Hackensplat Industries

Sunday, 9 December 2018

I was embarrassingly late in the game coming to GIT as a version control system. Time has since passed and I'm now happily using it. The days when we had to lock files before we worked on them are thankfully a distant memory.

Thursday, 25 January 2018

1993. Computers were desktop PCs running MS-DOS and the Internet was unheard of. My school had a number of PCs with Borland Pascal installed which my friends and I happily learnt. Along the way, we wrote a clever variation of the Minesweeper game. Life was good.

That would all change when I started my Computer Science degree course at university that year. Instead of many single-user machines running MS-DOS, we'd all be sharing a multi-user machine running UNIX.

Sunday, 8 September 2013

I've seen this cartoon being linked-to in so many comment threads and forums. Anytime its even a little bit applicable, someone will post a link to this cartoon. It has become so pervasive that if you search Google for "327", it’ll be the third link returned, right after the Wikipedia pages for the year and the car.

The lesson, according to this character and so many real people on the internet, is to sanitize your inputs. The school in the cartoon didn't sanitize its inputs - and one of its database tables got deleted!

Ask anyone about developing websites and they will tell you the first lesson is always to sanitize your inputs. In this day and age you'd have to be crazy not to sanitize your inputs.

Saturday, 15 June 2013

I listen to podcasts on my daily commute. These are radio shows that can be downloaded over the internet and listened to later. However, to keep up with a weekly show, I’d have to - every week - visit the show's website and manually download the latest episode. That would get real tedious real fast. To resolve the tedium for us all, the podcast catcher app was invented.

Podcast catchers allow me to list all the shows I want to listen to. Every day or so, it automatically checks each show on the list to see there are any new episodes for me. If it finds any, it downloads them and plays them for me.

Currently, I use Google’s ‘Listen’ app, but that service is about to be closed down with the imminent closure of Google Reader. I need to replace it. I've downloaded a handful of alternative apps, but they all lacked a feature I find essential. I remain a little flabbergasted that any podcast app out there does it any other way.